The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse - Incite at Columbia University
The Bifurcation of Racial Justice Discourse
- Funding Program The Breakdown/ (Re)generation Project
- Affiliated Center Data Science Institute The Institute for Research in African-American Studies
- Affiliated Departments Department of African American and African Diaspora Studies Barnard College Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Psychology
- Project Lead Colin Leach
Colin Leach is leading a multi-disciplinary team that works in a trans-disciplinary way to better understand how Black Lives Matter—the meme and the movement—moves people for, against, and away from racial justice in the U.S. and U.K.
The team, including Shaunette T. Ferguson and Nikhi Anand is examining the unprecedented use of Black Lives Matter (labels and content) for online discussion of racial justice in the summer of 2020 (after the murder of George Floyd) in comparison to previous time periods.
With support from Incite, Leach's team is adopting a systematic approach to evaluate the schismogenesis—a phenomenon where discourse bifurcates into polarized communities—by investigating peaks in online discussions using large datasets, including Freelon et al.'s and Giorgi et al.'s Twitter Corpus, along with the ACLED dataset for U.S. protests.
This research aims to identify intervention strategies for promoting constructive discussions and shared commitments to racial equality.
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